Re: Call for projects for grants

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Dave, Stormy,

I love your idea of providing grants for accessibility projects! 

> ...
>
> Some ideas I have are:
>
> Accessibility:
>
>  * Perfect a free software eye tracker program like OpenGazer (needs a
> *lot* of work to be usable & stable)
>  * Gestual commands - this existed when I was a young lad, you drew "N"
> with your mouse on the screen & this opened netscape. Would be very
> useful in touch-screen environments.
>  * Open voices - doing quality synthetic voices is a lot of work, major
> research project & lots of time in a sound studio with specialised
> actors. Funding one (or several) in various languages would be useful.
>   

Your first suggestion - funding improvements in OpenGazer - is already 
happening thanks to the AEGIS project, with funds from the European 
Commission as part of their Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).  See 
http://www.aegis-project.eu/ for general information about AEGIS, and 
note that the OpenGazer page now notes their AEGIS funding at 
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/opengazer/

OpenGazer is one of the engineering deliverables in AEGIS that is 
furthest along, with staff recently hired and coming up to speed on the 
codebase.  I expect the GNOME community will hear more from the 
OpenGazer folks soon...

AEGIS right now is winding up the first of five broad "phases" of work.  
This first phase is user requirements gathering (being done by the 
disability organization members of the AEGIS consortium), and it is 
culminating in a User Forum and Workshop in the UK in June (see 
http://www.aegis-project.eu/user_forum.html).  I'll be blogging about 
the results and of course the AEGIS website will be updated with them as 
well. 

Your third suggestion - open voices - is also a task that'll be getting 
AEGIS funding.  I expect that will start in the second half of this 
year, focused primarily on polishing the eSpeak voices in various 
European languages.  As that effort starts up, it'll get reported on in 
the gnome-accessibility mailing list.

[Mind you, just because something is being funded doesn't mean more 
funding is unwelcome.  For example, there are a *lot* of languages in 
the world; there is almost always work to be done in text-to-speech 
improvements, no matter who else is doing stuff in that space.]

> Internet + accessibility:
>
>  * Integrate an eBook library like Gutenberg Library or Bookshare into
> the desktop - integrate well with Orca to make a book reader
>   

The good folks at Benetech (creators of Bookshare) are using Mozilla 
Foundation funding to create a DAISY (and eBook) reader as an extension 
to Firefox.  Called DAISYfox, it was demoed at the CSUN Conference on 
Technology and Persons with Disabilities last month, and is coming along 
nicely. 

By the way, in case y'all didn't already know about it, there is also an 
"Export to DAISY" extension to OpenOffice.org, which addresses the other 
part of the eBook/DAISY equation - generating accessible books.  That 
work is coming along nicely, and while I don't think it's in the latest 
downloadable code, I've seen a version (at CSUN) that will generate a 
full talking book using eSpeak or other TTS engine that you have on your 
system.  It uses the latest in the DAISY Pipeline to do that 
(specifically Pipeline Lite), GPL code which now makes use of eSpeak as 
free TTS option.


I also want to second Alberto's suggestion of GtkWebKit accessibility 
support.  This effort could use more folks engaged in it...


Finally, please check out our already-prepared page of GNOME 
accessibility desires, at http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved 


Regards,

Peter Korn
Accessibility Architect & Principal Engineer,
(and AEGIS Technical Leader)
Sun Microsystems, Inc.